So, 2008 is coming to an end, and it’s time to sum it all up. Below is the stuff that I’ve found most interesting in the past year – good and bad. The list is totally disorganised, and thus not really a list. In these times of recession, I find it well in place though, to start out with a few positive notes (pun intended – I’m funny like that) concerning money.

Coins coins coins In April, the British Royal Mint revealed an extremely well designed set of new coins, designed by Matt Dent. The new 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p and £1 are a bold set of designs based on the Queen’s coat of arms, and I really really like both concept and execution. The reverse of the new £1 shows the full coat, and each of the smaller denominations depict close-up segments which, when fitted together, form the shield as a whole – like a jigsaw puzzle. The Dutch were lucky too – they had a sparkling new 5-euro coin introduced. The design is based on the proud tradition of Dutch architecture, and in a very delicate and intricate way. The front of the coin depicts the Dutch queen – as always – but this time a portrait made of type. The design is made of a list of the 109 alltime most prominent Dutch architects, according to how many hits they gained on the internet, and set in different weights to form the portrait. The reverse of the coin is a depiction of the Netherlands shaped by the spines of books on/by Dutch architects. Very clever! The most interesting part isn’t the delicate execution or the complex concept though, but the fact that the design was made using only free open source software. Stani Michiels who designed the coin, wrote a very nice and thorough walk-through of the process HERE. Speaking of coins, I have to pay a final respect to the Danish 25 øre. It has been discontinued and will soon be out of use. RIP beautiful numerals.

Rebranding soft drinks
Coca-Cola and Pepsi both revamped their identity this year. One of them failed (in MY book) and one of them did REALLY well.
Coca-Cola (the latter) teamed up with Turner Duckworth and went less is more. Everything besides the classic logo and the traditional coke-red were discontinued, leaving a very clean, ”honest” and approachable design, which still oozes of history and tradition (video HERE).
Pepsi went even further, and discontinued EVERYTHING except the blue/white/red color scheme. Instead of the traditional wave, they opted for at series of ”smiles”, and instead of the classic logotype they opted for something that REALLY reminds me of the type found on Axe/Lynx deodorant. The end product (nice video HERE) has been (deservedly) mocked in the blogsphere, and has been called everything between ”Asscrack Cola” and ”Obama Cola”.


Speaking of Obama
I’m not going in to politics here, but in terms of graphic design, the Obama campaign is certainly a memorable moment that deserves a mention. American election campaigns are almost a design discipline of it’s own – an almost nauseating exercise in patriotism – and even though the Obama campaign was also very American in terms of colors and visual rhetorics, it contained far less stars, stripes and eagles, than these campaigns usually do, and I found that really refreshing. I think it was a very wise strategy to opt for, after the immense amount of criticism of what a lot of people has conceived as hyper patriotism under the Bush-administration. Nice interview with Sol Sender, the designer of the famous Obama-O-logo HERE.
Benjamin Netenyahu in Israel also liked the Obama campaign. Apparently he even liked it enough to blatantly copy the Obama campaign website (Obama vs. Netenyahu).

Rebranding insurance The Danish insurance company Codans identity also had a major overhaul this year. The mother company RSA decided to streamline everything, and thus also the classic Codan logo. For me this was a very sad thing, since I’ve always really digged the old logo. What I really liked about it was the negative O formed by the C and the positive O. To me this has always been a Danish equivalent to the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo. The new logo has absolutely no personality in my book, but I guess that is what you get when you flatten out big company-merges. The Danish design community agrees.

Posten Norge (the Norwegian postal service) vs. Bring Pepsi and Codan were not the only ones to completely abandon their old identity – the same thing happened to the Norwegian postal service. Like the “Codan case” this also happened as a consequence of a “need” to streamline the mother ship (bring), and like the “Pepsi case” the end result is a discontinuation of everything historical, in favor of something more polished and (to me) anonymous. The old logo featuring the crown of Norway and a post horn, gave the postal service a solid, formal and trustworthy aesthetic. The new and more abstract logo IS nice and clean, but (while being very corporate and multimillion enterprise) totally lacks personality and meaning – and it TOTALLY looks like a POKEBALL.

Life magazine’s photo vault unlocked by google
Since I discovered this in the beginning of November, doing ”**** source:life” searches on google images, has been one of my favourite leisure time activities.
More than 10 million historic LIFE images are hosted on a special section of the Google Images site, in a joint effort between LIFE and google. Without a doubt my biggest time suck this autumn.

Rebranding Education
Being Danish and working with graphic design, I must include the redesign of the identity for University of Aarhus – but really there’s no need. This has without a doubt been the most talked about redesign in Denmark in the past year, and A LOT of people has already shredded it to pieces (here, here, here, here, here, here).
The most prominent part of the redesign is a very abstract representation of an alphabet as a fifth element. Aesthetically I actually really like it, but at the same time I think it is completely useless just don’t understand it. Why use letters for at fifth element, if they are completely illegible – isn’t the idea stripped of meaning, if the letters can’t be read or at least identified as being letters?

Design forecast 2009
what I’d LIKE to see in 2009.
In the beginning of 2008, Logoorange posted a list of trends they predicted would define logo design in 2008. A lot of the stuff on the list really made me cringe, but of course they were totally spot on. We HAVE seen a lot of spherical, glossy, transparent web 2.0 logos this year – almost as if the use of Photoshop’s glass button effect has been a mandatory finish in logo design.
I’m not a fortune-teller, but I’m SURE that we haven’t seen the end of that trend yet. On the other hand I’m also quite sure that this trend will have a decreasing popularity in the coming year. I hope the successor of this trend will be clean and honest design with strong emotional value – not like Pepsi, not like the new Posten, not like the new Codan, not like the new University of Aarhus, but EXACTLY like the new Coca-Cola. ENJOY!